The cloud, mobile devices, the Internet of Things (IoT) and the proliferation of software applications that touch nearly every aspect of quotidian activity create ever-greater volumes of data. These, unfortunately, are targets of nefarious individuals, organizations and government entities seeking financial gain or major economic or operational disruption.

Based on our experience in working with thousands of customers who’ve moved data and applications to the cloud, we’ve identified three critical pain points that impede an enterprise’s ability to effectively and efficiently manage encryption keys in the cloud.

The cloud strategy you adopt—private, hybrid, public or multicloud—is a key factor in the decision as to which encryption key management strategy will work best for your enterprise. For best results, your key strategy should fit your long-term cloud strategy and should be applied consistently across your enterprise.

As you transition from on-premise computing to cloud computing, securing your data in the cloud is paramount. Since encryption is a preferred way to secure data, encryption key management is a critical concern. Cloud providers have responded to this need with two options: a hardware security module (HSM) or a key management service (KMS). Each approach features benefits and drawbacks.

You learn a lot from your customers, especially how they use your products and what they find useful. At least that is what we experienced during our Equinix SmartKey public beta trial with dozens of enterprise and service provider participants.

The 451 Research Pathfinder Advisory report, “Key Management as a Service: A Concept for Modern Encrypted Data Requirements,” cites that more and more enterprise workloads are being placed in the cloud, an estimated 60% by 2018. Given these findings, the time has come for digital businesses to leverage key management as a service for protecting and accessing their data in multiple cloud platforms.

Today, we are announcing the launch of the Equinix SmartKey™ public beta program for the industry’s first HSM-as-a-Service, powered by Fortanix, based on Intel® Software Guard Extensions (SGX), a technology for application developers who are seeking to protect application code and data from disclosure or modification.